Immigration Demands Negotiation

The president set forth his demands in the immigration hostage crisis, and the legislators may capitulate. But we’re supposed to have debates on these topics and then some loud-mouth just issues demands and good-bye public discourse.

What should the US immigration system look like? Should we go all Canada and ignore their population size and general geographic differences? Should we do away with borders altogether?

The first problem with this four pillar approach is that immigration isn’t a single thing as the simple-minded would like to see it. There are various goals, some conflicting but just as often parallel. Diversity, for example, should not be competing with labor needs, because diversity is important in its own right.

Why do we need diversity? The US being a globally active nation, needs to stay well-linked to every corner of the earth. Whether for employers that are seeking to do business or for intelligence community needs, it’s incredibly useful to have people here that are connected and familiar with other places we don’t have deep roots in.

But to hear critics of immigration tell it, we should just forget about the rest of the world. It’s a lost cause.

Any immigration policy that does not account for topics like diversity, not just in humanitarian or pastoral terms, but in terms of development and practicalities, is a policy that hasn’t been studied by anybody with any serious care for the issue.

The other biggest flaw in these hard-liner EZ-Bake immigration policies is that they conflate the broken existing law with some immutable rule and use that as their jumping-off point to set the new policy. This sort of adherence to the past does not serve the current needs in exactly the same way that the new tax landscape was based on 1980s thinking.

We cannot afford to continue to look at issues off of yellowing newsprint when we have computers that provide real-time views of the world. The Republican policy on immigration used to make some sense, if it was a bit authoritarian. But the policy under Trump and the T-as-in-Trump Party is cruel and wasteful.

As with 99% of this administration’s policies, the damage done, they will be wiped off the map. But it is a shame that the damage must be done at all, particularly when they could see electoral benefit from adopting a rational policy instead. Stupid is as stupid does.

Another massacre. Still no action, not even on mental health, by the government.

What creates a slaughter? There are the instigator with some motive, the weapon, and the victims. If you remove any of these, there is no carnage. Leadership, particularly Republicans, from the president to the House and the Senate, have not acted to remove any of them, and they therefore cannot expect this violence to end. Their thoughts and prayers are welcome, but action is still required.

You can move forward on mental health, which might help. The main problem is that if a person is motivated to attack, the treatment ineffective, there is no recourse to stop them without better laws that could result in them not acquiring the weapon. And Republicans can’t have that. Indeed, they weakened such laws as soon as Trump took office.

That said, we should have better mental healthcare for its own sake, to obliterate the suffering in the minds across this country, for the same reasons we need universal healthcare: it’s the right thing to do.

You can remove the weapon. But you can’t with Republicans in charge.

Or you can remove the victims. Without innocent people to shoot, there can be no attack. They can be hidden, or protected, or made difficult to hit. Schools can be transformed into prison fortresses. Jill can learn her ABCs during count and Jack can learn to count by counting the number of gates he passes through on his way to class.

The obvious solution is to remove the weapon from the equation. Republicans suck at math and call the weapon an invariant. In November, we should vote out as many of them as it takes to break this stalemate and protect our nation from this bullshit.